YouTube is now available to Google Apps users with their Apps accounts - one of dozens of new services that are now available to Google Apps users as part of a recent Google Apps launch.

Google Apps is Google’s suite of communication and collaboration products that run entirely in the “cloud.” These products (such as Gmail for businesses, Google Calendar and Google Docs) are used by more than 30 million people in small and large businesses, educational institutions, government agencies and non-profit organizations all around the world. If your organization hasn’t gone Google yet you can read more about it here.

YouTube can help Google Apps customers in lots of ways - whether archiving company videos, marketing their company through branded video channels, or assisting with internal communications.

For more information about getting started on YouTube with your Apps account, read the complete post on the Google Enterprise blog and follow all the updates on other newly-available services for Google Apps users. And if you’ve already started using YouTube with Google Apps at your organization, do share your story. Your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign.

Note: This functionality is available in all countries where YouTube operates.

3 comments
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Hi, I posted this to the Google Enterprise Blog, and the EDU Administrator's circle, no response yet. I think there are big problems in how Google brought YouTube into Google Apps for Education (GAE).

In our pilot accounts:1. YouTube does not show up as another service in the upper left menu like Mail, Calendar, Documents, Sites, etc. It only shows up under iGoogle, "More," which most account users don't use.

2.The YouTube GAE account is not under your real name, in my case Frank Fulchiero, like all my other GAE services. I had to come up with a new original letter combination. There seems to be no correlation between my Google Apps for Education account name and my new YouTube account name. Every other core service in GAE is under the same user name.

3. You cannot set YouTube viewing privileges for our domain, either individually or globally, like we can Sites, Docs and other Google Services. We want some videos to only be viewable only by our domain accounts, but there is no way to do it.

All in all, the integration is a bit of a mess. If you want to add the YouTube service to a GAE account, it should behave like all the other services, and it does not. Are there any plans to fix this?

I totally agree with Frank. GoogleApps(YouTube) needs the same sharing capabilities of Sites and Docs, inc. Groups, and there needs to be a way for GAE Admins to lay out a public and non-public channel hierarchy under GoogleApps(YouTube).

Also, I haven't looked but I trust that GAE Admins can remove restrictions and limits on media file size, time limits, etc. ...and that we can enable a tag cloud and other collab intelligence specific for our institution in addition to a generic tagcloud.

Also, unlike consumer YouTube, captioning is mostly no longer an option for an institutional GoogleApps(Youtube) so we need built-in smarts and admin controls to define our institutional digital accessibility policy and requirements.